Posted By On November 10, 2004 @ 2:51 PM In Free Downloads | No Comments

Weekly Download: DrvClonerXP

This week’s download was actually sent to us by a thoughtful reader, and he must have been reading my mind because I’ve been looking for a free program like this for a while. I’ve always said that with a regular backup strategy and a good drive image you don’t have to worry about losing your hard drive. Backup software isn’t that hard to find and varies in price, not to mention almost all burning programs include backup software right in the package. In XP if you get desperate enough you can simply drag-n-drop any sensitive or valuable data directly onto a recordable CD.

When you start talking about drive cloning or imaging it’s a different story, I was huge supporter of a program called Drive Image by Power Quest, but Symantec bought it and took what they wanted out of the program and put it into the new Norton Ghost, dropped the Drive Image name altogether and put a $70.00 price tag on it. Now I think that’s a lot of money for a home user to spend on a drive clone program, especially when we sold it for under $25.00. Now there are some other games in town as far as this technology goes, but I’ve got a free download you can cut your teeth on, so why not give it a try.

If you’re not familiar with drive imaging, basically what it does is take a “snapshot” of your partition. This is different from simply backing up data. To help explain let’s say you just reloaded Windows on your system you have all the updates, and drivers installed and you’re ready to go. With DrvCloneXP you can take an Image (snapshot) of the partition so you can always have a copy of the system when it was in this state. Does that make sense? So basically what I’m trying to say is, you made a backup of the whole drive so that if any catastrophe happens you can simply restore the image. After the image restore is complete, then use your regular backups to get everything up to speed. See how that works, it’s a great one-two combination that covers your behind no matter what.

The program takes no time to download, the interface is small and to the point. There is a help file that I recommend everyone read in order to get the details of the program down before starting. At the bottom of the “Help” file there is contact information, and there is also a forum at their site where you can bounce questions and comments off of fellow users. Having a drive clone as part of your backup regiment is a smart plan to help you avoid data loss (and reduce stress). I hope you enjoy the program, and thanks Adrian for the e-mail.